Friday, 1 December 2017

How does a life with or without music practice change your brain? Photo by T. Gaertner

When I have kids who are struggling with their piano pieces,
I try to encourage them by acknowledging that playing the piano is hard. In fact, by learning how to play
music, they are actually changing the
structure of their brain.

But how much am I exaggerating here? How much does musical
training really change your brain?

There’s some pretty good evidence to support the fact that
musical training causes people to have larger auditory cortex, a larger hand
area in the motor part of their cortex, and better connections between these
two areas and between the two sides of the brain. This research has generally
been done two different ways: a) by comparing the brains of musicians to those
of non-musicians and b) by giving music lessons to children and seeing how their brain structure changes.

Both of these types of research have the same problem: we
can’t tell what differences are caused by practice and what are caused by
genetics. Perhaps people who have brains that grow larger auditory cortex (for
example) are the ones who have a natural talent for music, and so they continue with lessons and
become musicians. In other words, maybe it was the brain structure that caused
the person to be a musician, not the other way around. Maybe the kids who stick
with music lessons are the ones whose brains are genetically predisposed to
being “musical”.

What would be really useful is some magical way of taking a
single person and seeing what their brain would look like with and without a
lifetime of musical practice.

A recently-published study has managed to do the next best
thing. The researchers, Örjan de Manzano and Fredrik Ullén, at the Karolinska
Institute in Sweden, studied 9 identical twin pairs in which one twin studied
piano and the other did not. In each pair, both twins started music study at
the same time but one dropped out of lessons quite early while the other
continued with piano lessons. On average, the piano-studying twin had played
the piano for over 4000 hours more than the twin who quit piano, and the playing twin
was still an active amateur pianist.

The researchers looked to see what differences in
brain structure were found between the practicing and non-practicing twins,
assuming that if the piano-playing twin hadn’t practiced, their brain would look
like their twin’s (which is a reasonable assumption, based on other twin
studies). Basically, the non-practicing twin acted as a control for the
practicing twin.

What they found confirmed some of what had been found in
previous studies: musical training leads to a thicker cerebral cortex in
auditory and motor areas on the left side of the brain and a greater volume of
grey matter in parts of the cerebellum, which plays a role in motor control. Musical
training also increases the organization of white matter in the auditory and
motor parts of the cortex on both sides of the brain and in the corpus callosum,
which connects the two hemispheres.

These changes in brain structure are found in the parts of
the brain most used in piano practice. When we practice, we’re connecting
auditory information with motor control, linking up the movements that we need
to make in order to produce audible musical sounds. In the brains of musicians, the auditory cortex,
the motor cortex, and the fibre bundles that connect these regions are bigger and
better organized. Also, the corpus callosum, which plays a role in bimanual
co-ordination, has more organized structure. These differences in brain
structure between piano-playing and non-playing twins are clearly not due to
genetic differences, so they must be due to differences in life experience. In
other words, hours and hours of music practice have altered the structure of
the playing twins’ brains.

As for my struggling students: Knowing that this is true
doesn’t make it less work, but perhaps it can be reassuring, and motivate them
to keep growing the auditory-motor parts of their brains, synapse by synapse.

Tuesday, 7 November 2017

More and more these days, people are interested in the neuroscience underlying our behaviours and our ability to learn. This is fantastic, but the downside to this enthusiasm for neuroscience is that there is a lot of pseudo-neuroscience making the rounds. A few weeks back, when someone on a piano pedagogy Facebook group mentioned exercises for “crossing the midline”, a warning sign immediately flashed in my mind, and I decided to investigate a little.

There is a fairly common neuro idea that exercises that involve body parts crossing the midline (for example, touching your right elbow to your left knee) are good for encouraging neuroplasticity, especially interhemispheric communication (the two sides of the brain talking to each other) and bilateral sensory integration (putting together sensory information from the two sides of the body). Midline-crossing exercises are touted to improve how the two sides of the brain talk to each other and have all sorts of other benefits. See, for example, this article entitled “Why crossing the midline activities helped this child listen to his teacher”.

My gut feeling was that these claims are questionable, and I wanted to know whether there is any research to support them.

A quick search of the scientific literature found exactly zero studies investigating this effect. There is no evidence to directly support the idea that crossing-the-midline exercises improve interhemispheric communication. A Google search of the same topic turned up a 2013 “Ask a neuroscientist” blog post, which confirmed that there is no research to directly support the effectiveness of crossing-the-midline exercises. In fact, that blog post suggested that the best way to increase connections between the two hemispheres of the brain was to learn a musical instrument.

It’s tempting to just conclude that this idea is pseudoscience and leave it at that. But given the prevalence of this idea, I’d like to dig just a little deeper and talk about where this idea comes from. There is actually some logic to it.
To start with, let me explain how these types of exercises work both sides of the brain. Imagine you’re using your right hand to reach over and touch a target in front of the left side of your body. The right hand is controlled by the left motor cortex. Your awareness of space on the left side of your body happens in the right side of your brain, in the posterior parietal lobe.

If we move our right hand into the left side of our personal
space, then in order to coordinate where our hand is in space, the left motor
cortex must communicate with the right parietal lobe, using fibres that travel
through the corpus callosum, the big fibre bundle connecting the two sides of
the brain.

Presumably, if both sides of the brain are active and
talking to each other, this increases the strength of their connection, but I should reiterate that it’s not clear
that simply performing exercises that cross the midline will lead to increased
connectivity.

When I delved into the literature about crossing the
midline, I found that researchers study the development of midline reaching as
part of the development of handedness.If
you put an object in front of a baby, but put it a little to one side of the
midline, she will almost always reach with the closest arm.As children age, they become more likely to
reach with the dominant arm, which means that if the object is placed on the
non-dominant side, they must reach across the midline to pick it up.The development of this behaviour seems to
parallel the development of the corpus callosum, the big bundle of nerve fibers
which communicates between the two hemispheres.This doesn’t necessarily mean that the cross-midline reaching causes interhemispheric communication;
it’s more likely that the increase in communication between the sides allows
the hemispheres to specialize and this leads to hand dominance.

Children with developmental delays often don’t automatically
reach across the midline.They are more
likely to reach with whichever hand is closest to the object. This is
correlated with delayed dominance and decreased laterality of the brain.So occupational therapists do test for a
child’s tendency to cross the midline, and if the child doesn’t reach across
the midline in a normal fashion, the therapist will recommend midline-crossing
activities to try to help develop a more dominant hand. This doesn’t seem to be
an evidence-based therapy, seeing as there aren’t any studies to support
it.However, therapists may see
improvement based on these exercises in individual cases and this justifies
their use.

Even if midline-crossing exercises do help develop hand
dominance and bimanual interaction in children with developmental delays, that
doesn’t mean there is any benefit to these exercises in normally developing
children.In children who have developed
strong hand dominance, midline-crossing exercises probably aren’t doing much,
in my opinion.

In short, there is no evidence that these exercises are useful
for people with normal development, and even for people who are not
neurotypical, the main relevance seems to be in the development of handedness,
not some miraculous creation of connections in the brain.

Monday, 3 July 2017

In my spare time, I am slowly learning Bach’s English Suite
in A minor, movement by movement. I take
a break from writing or studying and I sit down at the piano, pick a small
section, and work through it, trying to get it under my fingers. I always make progress throughout a practice
session, and leave the piano feeling like I’ve accomplished some learning. But the next day, when I come back to the
piano, and try the same section, I’m usually disappointed. The improvements from the previous day don’t
seem to last in the same way they did when I was a younger musician.Unfortunately, this is a natural effect of aging.

Memory and learning differ between young adults and older
adults in a number of ways. Older adults tend to have more difficulty with
declarative memory – conscious memory for facts and events – than younger
adults. This is often attributed to
age-related loss of neurons in the hippocampus, a structure in the brain that
is the site of declarative memory formation. So if I tell you that Ulaan Baatar is the capital of Mongolia, you would store
that in your declarative memory. If
you’re twenty, you are more likely to remember this fact tomorrow than if you are
seventy. From a psychological point of view, deficits in declarative memory
seem to be related to decreased attentional resources in older people. In other
words, older people can’t pay attention to as many different things at once as
a younger person can, so they can’t spend as much time committing any one fact
to memory. That means the capital of Mongolia won’t be stored in their memory as stably as it would in a young
person.

Motor learning uses a different type of memory known as
procedural memory, and has its own difficulties for older adults. Older people are able to improve at a new
skill over a practice session, but they show a different pattern from young
people when it comes to retaining that skill. When young research volunteers learn a new motor skill, such as a
finger-tapping pattern, they improve significantly over a practice period, with
a decrease in the number of errors and a gradual increase in speed. When the volunteers come back the next day
for a second session, their performance often has improved overnight, without
any further practice. This is due to sleep-dependent consolidation, in which our motor skills both improve and become resistant to interference
from other memories, while we’re sleeping. People can literally improve their motor skills, such as playing a musical
instrument, just by sleeping.

As we age, things start to change. Older adults just don’t show the same
between-sessions improvement in motor skills, and in fact their performance on
the second day of training on a task starts out much lower than where they left
off the day before, just like when I practice Bach. When researchers compared
the brainwaves of sleeping young adults with sleeping older adults, it became
clear that older adults spend less time in slow-wave sleep and show a decrease
in sleep spindles, a particular type of brainwave that is believed to be
important in motor memory consolidation.

Research from the University of Montreal suggests that the hippocampus, even though its main role is in declarative memory, is important
for sleep-dependent consolidation of motor memory. This implies that decreased hippocampal
function in aging leads to problems with motor memory consolidation. The key point here is that there are important
interactions between the declarative and procedural memory systems. Which means that the
declines in declarative memory which happen naturally with age also affect
procedural memory.

Understanding this gives us a hint at a solution to the
problem of motor learning in older adults. One of the ways in which we learn motor skills is by using declarative
memory to help us along the way. For
example, when we’re learning a new piece of music, we consciously read the
music and try to be aware of things we need to remember: cross finger 4 over here; F# in left hand
here, and so on. Using declarative memory to bolster motor learning is a poor strategy when declarative
memory isn’t working so well. In order
to counteract the effects of poor declarative memory on motor learning, we
should choose practicing strategies that rely more on implicit, procedural
memory, strategies based on repetition of the movements we want to
learn rather than our cognitive appraisal of the notes and movements required
to make them.

The obvious candidate for this type of learning is a
technique called errorless learning. This technique suggests that if you can
simplify a task somehow so that it can be practiced without making errors (or
at least as few as possible), then you engage procedural memory systems,
leading to more automatic performance. For example, a 2012 study by Chauvel and colleagues tested older and
younger adults in two techniques to learn golf putting skills. One group used “infrequent error” learning,
where the people practiced putting into a hole from a short distance away. The other group practiced putting from a
larger distance, while led to more frequent errors because the task was
harder. This second group had to develop
declarative strategies about how to improve. Then both groups were tested on putting from an intermediate distance,
with and without distractions. The
researchers wanted to see if the older adults fared better with one type of
learning than the other. And the results
were clear: when using the “infrequent
error” approach, older and younger adults performed equally well on the
test. Using the “frequent error”
approach older adults performed worse than younger adults.

In music practice, errorless practice can be achieved by
practicing at a slow enough tempo to avoid mistakes in pitch and rhythm. I’ve adopted this approach recently, playing
everything extremely slowly and accurately and I found that it improved my
retention of the pieces both within and between practice sessions.

Of course, the idea of practicing slowly is not new or
mind-shattering. I often tell my
students that if they’re practicing their pieces so quickly that they’re making
mistakes, then they’re actually practicing their mistakes. But since reading about errorless learning,
I’ve been encouraging them more and more to practice error-prone sections using
“slow-motion” practice, and this has been very helpful for them. It’s revealing to see the reasoning behind
why this works: because errorless practicing
is training our procedural, automatic memory.

While my sense of
pride wants me to point out that I don't actually fall into the
category of "older adult", I'm not as young as I used to be, and clearly
that makes a difference in how my memory processes function. As in the story of the tortoise and the hare,
slow and steady wins the race, especially if you're no spring chicken. References

Sunday, 5 March 2017

My students of all ages, even the three-year-olds, have
spent the last few months lovingly creating their own musical compositions. The
impetus for this is provided by the Music for Young Children (MYC®) International
Composition Festival, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this
year. Thousands of MYC students from around the world have sent their
compositions to be played and reviewed by a panel of teachers and composers who
are charged with the difficult task of deciding which compositions will make it
to the final round and be given first, second, or third place ranking, or an
honourable mention.

I recently spoke over the phone with Frances Balodis, the
founder of MYC® and
chair of the MYC Composition Festival.

TG: Why do you think
it’s important to teach composition to young children?

FB: It helps them understand what they’re playing. It helps
them memorize. When they come to memorize something you can say, “There’s the
motive, and now it’s repeated, but is it repeated exactly the same? Now listen
to the sequence.” So when they go to play by memory, and they falter just a
little bit, you can support them so nicely by referring to the compositional
techniques.

Also, when they are composing, you can talk about the need
to have dynamics and tempo markings. You can ask them, “Would you like the
whole piece to be allegro, or is there going to be a ritardando?”

I have noticed that many children really improve in their
playing after studying composition, and they improve in their understanding. After
we’ve done composition, then the children will look at a song that they’re
going to play, and say, “Oh I see the motive.” I think that by teaching
composition, it really opens up their eyes to what they’re playing.

TG: What do you think
is most challenging about composing for the students?

FB: Keeping the whole map in their head, because sometimes
they will start out with a really good idea and then they kind of go off on
some side trips and they have a little trouble getting back home. It’s
important for them to understand how to take a trip and explore lots of really
interesting things, and come back home.

TG: What makes a good
composition?

FB: I like to see an interesting motive. And you can have an
interesting motive even if you only know C, D, and E. And coming to a good
conclusion, a conclusion that makes sense. I think variety is also important. Sometimes you get a composition
where the left hand is all broken triads, too repetitive. I was looking at
Facebook this morning and saw a darn good composition that someone had posted. They
had a nice waltz pattern, and then they changed the left hand pattern so they
had a nice little broken chord. That contributes to being a good composition.A good composition also has nice phrasing, and
sensible cadences.

TG: For the composition festival, the
children write out their compositions in their own handwriting. How important
is that?

FB: Honestly,
some of the compositions that my children wrote, I did not have them spend
hours and many tears recopying them. I think that’s a mistake, and it makes me
sad when people send their compositions in and they look spick and span. And I
think, “Hmmm… I hope the child didn’t cry when they had to recopy it.”

What I used
to say to my students is that writing a composition is like writing a letter. When
I send you a letter, in my handwriting, as long as you can read it, the
communication has been successful. It is not successful if I send you a letter
that you can’t understand. You have to be able to look at the letter that I’ve
sent you and understand what I’m trying to tell you, and it’s the same thing
with a composition. When we make our composition and we send it off, we’re
sending a musical letter.

I always tell
the reviewers of the compositions, if the treble clef is backwards, if the
stems are on the wrong side of the note, it’s okay. Sometimes the winning composition
looks like a chicken walked across the page.

TG: What is the best
way to introduce composing to young children?

FB: I like the concept of teaching composition through art. I got the idea of doing that and
then people kept saying, “Oh gosh, I wish this was written down.” And then
Frederick Harris published my Young Composers Notebooks
for quite a number of years.

With the youngest children I just use coloured circle stickers. You
can move the circles up the page, you can move the circles down the page, you
can make the circles go backwards, which sometimes is enough — just to
teach the children the compositional techniques of repetition, sequence and
retrograde.

Bach is such a wonderful example of these techniques: there
it is, there’s the motive, there’s the repetition, there’s the sequence. Bach
was the master of sequence. So sometimes when children or parents say, “That’s
too easy,” I say, “Really? Take a
look at the masters here. It’s not too easy.”

Friday, 27 January 2017

Aria is 10 years old, and has been studying piano with me
for many years. She’s small for her age, with a shy, soft voice and a wry sense
of humour. At her lesson, I test her note-naming and find it, to be perfectly
frank, abysmal. We continue on
with the lesson, and start work on a new piece, Beethoven’s Ecossaise in G Major. I ask her to
sight-read the right hand part, and she peers at the music, figuring out what
the first note is. Then she plays through the first line of music fairly well,
doing an excellent job considering her terrible performance at note-naming.
However, in the second bar, there is an interval of a seventh. She misreads the
second note of the interval, ending up playing the end of the phrase a step too
low.

Despite not knowing her notes very well, Aria is a
half-decent sight-reader because she mostly reads by interval, simply going up
or down one note (a step) or two (a skip) as the music indicates. Larger
intervals are harder to read, so she sometimes makes mistakes with these, and
reading over a line break is much more difficult because it’s hard to see the
vertical relationship between the notes when they are on different lines.

Leonard, 9 years old, arrives for his lesson with a cheerful
smile.He has been learning The Silent Moon by Nancy Telfer, but
when he plays it for me, he quickly runs into trouble, hitting a wrong note in
the second phrase.He can hear it too,
and restarts the phrase, this time landing on a different wrong note in the
same place. I notice that Leonard is not looking at the music; he is watching
his fingers. Despite the fact that the music book is open on front of him, he is
playing from memory, searching for the notes by ear. I’m concerned about his
ability to read the music, so I test his note-naming using stack of flashcards.
Leonard names the notes quickly and easily, so I open up his sight-reading book
to a simple exercise.Before he plays
it, I ask him to look at the music and tell me how many times the melody moves
by a skip instead of step. He puzzles through the music and incorrectly tells
me there are three skips in the melody.In fact, there is only one.

These two students use entirely different strategies for
reading music.Leonard does well at reading
by note, while Aria’s strength is reading by interval.Strong sight-readers combine the two
strategies. What you might not realize is that the two different strategies use
entirely different parts of the brain.

When we read music, the visual information travels from the
eyes to the visual cortex at the very back of the brain. The visual cortex receives that information
and then passes it on to other regions of the visual cortex that process that
information, sorting out contours of the things we see, how they’re oriented in
space, if they’re moving, what colour they are, and how bright. The brain needs
to do two main things with all this information: It has to answer the question
“what am I seeing?” and it has to answer the question “what should I do with
what I’m seeing?”

To answer these two questions, visual information is
processed through two very different pathways in the brain, known as the ventral stream (vision for perception)
and the dorsal stream (vision for
action).

The ventral stream, which involves the temporal lobe of the brain,
has long been known as the “what” stream, since it is the pathway we use to
recognize and name the things we are seeing. It is this pathway that we use for
note-naming. Imagine we see a note on the first space of the treble staff. In
the ventral stream, what we see match up the image of what we see with pictures
we have stored in memory, and this is how we know to name that note as a F.
This is how we recognize what we see, leading to a conscious perception of what
we are looking at, and a conscious understanding of what we see. In music
reading, we use the ventral stream for note-naming, recognizing musical symbols
and understanding their meaning, for conscious pattern recognition, and for
naming chords.

It’s this ventral stream that is a weakness in Aria’s sight-reading.
She has a hard time naming individual notes, so finding the correct note to play
at the beginning of a line or after a large interval is difficult. Leonard, on the other hand, has a strong
ventral stream, but on its own it is not enough to make him a good
sight-reader.He also needs to have a
strong dorsal stream.

The dorsal stream, which involves the parietal lobe, directly
relates what we see to the actions that are required. The parietal lobe plays
an important role in spatial perception, and so this pathway processes the
spatial aspects of what we’re looking at, and matches it up with our knowledge
of what to do with that object. This activates the correct movement. In music reading, we use the dorsal stream to
know what movements to make to play straight-forward patterns, to know how far
to reach for each interval, to make the correct hand shapes for chords. The
dorsal stream automatically converts well-known visual cues into movements.

This is why Aria, who is terrible at note-naming, can sight-read
music pretty well. Her dorsal stream does a good job of reading intervals and
telling her what finger movements she should make.Leonard, on the other hand, tries to rely on his ventral stream for reading music. He can name the
notes well, but he doesn’t easily translate the written notes into how he should move his fingers.

How do I help these two students?It’s not enough to just hand them a
sight-reading book and tell them to go practice.Aria needs to practice note-naming
specifically:matching up notes on the
staff with their names.In addition, she
should practice playing individual notes on the piano.Flashcards are a good tool here.Leonard has different needs:he should practice reading
intervallically.An excellent resource
for this is The Sight Reading Drill Book by Barbara Siemens, which systematically introduces intervals and
chord patterns, and encourages the student to read by interval and by hand
shape rather than by note-naming, strengthening the dorsal stream of visual
processing. Siemens describes this approach by saying, “It’s a
mind-finger thing.I think sometimes you
have to try to bypass that naming thing and just do it intuitively.Which means you have to drill it enough.”As an experienced piano teacher, Siemens saw
a need in her own students for intervallic sight-reading practice.“Because you don’t have time to think of
notes as you’re going.The name thing is
just attaching a tag to something that should go intuitively.”

Every student has different strengths and weaknesses. This
is true even within a single skill such as sight-reading. As a teacher, it’s important
that I remember that and use different approaches to bolster students’
abilities and help them achieve their musical goals.

About Me

Tara Gaertner is a neuroscientist, music educator, writer and speaker. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas, Houston. She has taught piano, flute, and music theory since 1988 and currently teaches the Music for Young Children program as well as private piano and flute lessons. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, lecturing on Neuroscience in the department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.